Favorite books on staff or spear fighting, but NOT just books of form

[Faux Newbie]

Been reading McLemore's The Fighting Staff, and wondered if any here had any books they enjoyed on staff or spear fighting. Not so much books that have just form, nothing against them at all, it's just they are a bit easier to find decent ones on.

[RenDaHai]

I haven't seen many. People have huge misconceptions about staff fighting.

I saw that book on Amazon, whats it like?

[Faux Newbie]

I haven't seen many. People have huge misconceptions about staff fighting.

I saw that book on Amazon, whats it like?

I like it. His approach is a mix of Chinese and Western staff, but he's upfront about that.

It's all basic stuff, followed by drills to work them. The diagrams can be a bit confusing at first, but often are useful. The drills are about what you'd expect.

He focuses for much of the book on basic strikes and defenses to different regions, and you sort of have to remember his numbered system for the regions to make sense of sections(especially because I have it on Kindle, and so flipping back to other sections is a little tedious). He splits it into 8 regions of attack, it's a fairly simple set-up. The section on switching grips and the drills on it are simple and nice, there's lots of things it doesn't cover, but he's clear that he's not including every technique that one can learn, but the essential ones.

One thing I do like is that he tends to approach the moves in a way that brings you off the line of attack. A lot of people get the habit from two man forms of always doing technique squared up, and not taking advantage of angles.

Some of the chapters are more conceptual, but they read pretty well, imo.

I wish a couple sections had more, specifically long range could have been a bit longer, but it's still decent, but the section on struggling stick to stick felt like it could have used more diagrams and more detailed explanation.

Some techniques you may do differently than he does, that was the case with me, but what he says still often applies. I felt this way especially about the section on blocking.

Sometimes, his organization switches in the later chapters, but that's just me nitpicking.

There are a few sets that are interesting(a number of the drills are for two people). Some are stick to stick, one is stick versus a cutlass, I think there's even some that are stick versus a guy with an axe and a knife. These are short sets, usually illustrating something in the chapter.

I really liked it, but the organization, like I said, could be tighter in the latter half.

He writes in an engaging way, and is very enthusiastic about the topic, and not partisan regarding style that I recall. I enjoyed that aspect of it.

He proposes a particular combo, I also would have liked to see him add more combos he liked, but I generally liked the book.